Retrospect
by FlitShadowflame
Summary: I came out of that movie wanting only one thing: details about the childhoods of the rest of the crew. Spock and Kirk were reasonably well-explored, but here are my versions of snapshots of memory for the other five main crewmembers. Complete!
1. Polaris

The manor house was set into the slope of the mountain, allowing its occupants to look out, not just over the valley and the village within, but to have a clear, beautiful view of the stars.

It was the stars that had charmed the little boy watching them now. He was lying on his back in the grass, as he did nearly every night when he was home, since before he could remember. If he wasn't at home, he still found a way to look at those stars.

"When you were a baby, the night sky was the only thing that could make you stop crying," his father said gently. "There was my little one, only a few days old and already going 'wah, wah,' all the time, and your mother and I had no idea what to do."

The boy listened eagerly, though he'd heard the story many times before.

"So finally, I showed you the only thing that has been known to silence me all my long years: the endless beauty of a starry sky. And the first word you spoke was Polaris, picking it out of the rest of the stars so easily." Andrei smiled at his son. "I tried not to be too jealous."

"Papa!" the boy laughed. "Tell me about one of the constellations," he insisted.

"Ahhh, my little one, I have told you their stories many times over, and the stories that other cultures have given them. Aren't you bored with these tales yet?"

"Never," the boy said dreamily.

"Pavel Andreivich, come inside this instant!" his mother yelled. "Your room is a hazard zone!"

Andrei laughed. "Little one, how many times must we tell you…your head belongs at your chores first, and _then_ you may send it among the constellations."

Pavel grumbled only a little before going inside to clean.


	2. Natsunohoshi

The ship maneuvered nimbly at his handling, dodging Klingon weapons and space junk. He moved into position for the perfect shot, right at the engines of the war-bird, and –

The screen blanked. He groaned, flipping off his headset.

"Awww, Aunt Mei, I was in the middle of a simulation," he complained.

"And I just finished cooking," she said pointedly. "It's dinner-time, young man. Get into the kitchen."

He obeyed sullenly, picking at the unappetizing meal. Even replicators made better stir fry than his aunt. "When's Dad getting back?" he asked.

His Uncle Derek's shoulders tensed, his fork scraping the plate noisily.

Oriental eyes widened. "He is…coming back, right?" he asked, trembling with nerves.

"Hikaru," Aunt Mei started, but he didn't want to hear the rest.

He shoved the dish away and ran to his room. He stared with blurry eyes at the tapestry with elegant kanji that his father had given him for his last birthday, in June. "Natsunohoshi, kuroisorakara, hikarukita." In the summer stars, from the black sky, came a light (Hikaru).

-

A/N: I made up the haiku myself when Google wasn't very forthcoming. I would have liked to find something by Basho, for instance, but I got lazy. Direct translation is: "Summer stars, from the black sky, a light came."

My goal with these one-shots is to provide scenes from the lives of various important Star Trek characters. Pavel and Hikaru are my favorites, so it makes sense that I start with them. I'm trying to do the same thing that Abrams did with Kirk's car-driving escapade, and leave the name for the last moment.


	3. Complicated Metaphors

It was not unusual to see a little girl prattling with her dolls, even if those dolls were of several alien species. The thing that still got that little girl's grandmother to laugh, though, was the way her baby would "translate" for the figurines.

"My little star," Ramla told her granddaughter, "don't your dollies have universal translator implants?" The technology didn't exist, of course, but that didn't stop other imaginative little girls.

"Gramma, that's not how U.T.s work!" she protested. "And anyway, the crew has never run into this kind of alien before. They speak in very complicated metaphors that the ship's computer doesn't understand."

Ramla smiled. "I suppose you picked up their language pretty quickly though, huh baby?"

"Of course," the girl said firmly. "The captain is being a pig again. I'm not going to translate him disrespecting the senator." The senator was a pretty, female Romulan doll that the girl had painted blue at some point. The captain was a portly old human man.

"Come on, Nyota. Time to do your math homework." Ramla kissed the little girl's forehead and helped her put away the dolls.


	4. Wings

The boy hissed as he prodded the scrape. This was clearly a job for Leo.

"Kyle," Leo hissed. "Don't you ever _look_ before ya do stuff like this?" He tenderly took the proffered appendage and examined the wound. "C'mon, we gotta warsh it or it'll get 'nfect'd." After ten seconds under tap water and a few dabs with iodine, Kyle was cussing him out and Leo was filching one of the larger bandages from the medicine cabinet. "Now don't try ta rip off the bandage. It'll come off when it's s'posed ta, these're the good kind. You kin warsh wiv it on, too, but don't scrub the injured area. An' be more careful nex' time, dummy!" He hit Kyle lightly in the back of the head.

"Ah will," Kyle promised sullenly. "But didja see, Leo? I musta got three feet in the air!"

"If we was s'posed ta fly, God woulda given us wings. Keep yer feet on the ground!" Leo reprimanded, stalking off.

Kyle shook his head. Leonard McCoy just didn't know how to have _fun_.


	5. Fixing the Television

"Lad, ge' ou' a there! Wot, y' think yer some kinda immortal? Those circuits kin fry yer wee brains!" his mother screeched at him.

"Ma, I'm tryin' ta get this bloody channel ta – hah! Try it naiw."

"Watch yer mouth! An' – are ye daft, boy? 'm not turnin' on the damn thing 'til ye ge' _out_!"

"I'm comin', I'm comin'!" the boy muttered, scooting back on a skateboard and flicking the television on. It sparked, fizzed, and went dead. "Hm, musta been the wrong – " he was interrupted by his mother boxing his ears.

"Montgomery Fitzwilliam Scott! If you broke me tellie I'll tan yer hide!"


	6. Fairy Princess

A/N: I realize this is probably drastically different from Chekov's original background. But I am having a rough time getting any confirmed facts, and I have no idea what's canon and what's fanon, so I'm making it up as I go along. I'm trying to keep this as general as possible.

Sea air was a miraculous thing. For centuries it was believed to cure almost any sickness, and Earth history was full of men who had experienced a scant breath of it before devoting their lives to that tempting mistress, the sea.

Pavel Andreivich Chekov was one of many millions of men who had fallen under her spell. From a young age he'd been fascinated, had begged to go sailing with his father. By four, he was not only allowed, he wore the uniform and helped his father chart their course. By five, his father left him to do it by himself, insisting that he, Andrei, was getting in Pavel's way.

Now Pavel was twelve. He had done just about every job there was to do on the small sailing vessel, his father's pride and joy. She was named _Tatiana_, fairy princess, and knowing the way she darted and cut in the water, Pavel had never found the name unfitting.

He'd even gotten used to do his homework as she rolled with the waves, though he was sure his penmanship suffered for it. By all accounts – and he'd eavesdropped and spied enough on the correspondence with his tutors to know – Pavel was a prodigy, several grades ahead of his age-mates. If his knowledge intake continued at this rate, they expected he would have a GED-equivalent within the year.

But for the moment, Pavel didn't care about GEDs, homework, whether he'd be sent to tack that slippery sail properly on his next shift, or the way the bunks reeked after too long a-sea. He just breathed in that sea air and stared up at the stars that, one way or another, had kept their hold on him his whole life so far.


	7. Horse with no skeleton

Japanese was not a dead language by any means, but it was barely spoken outside of Japan. Hikaru's grandmother had been the most recent member of his family to speak it; he was actually more Filipino than Japanese, by ancestry. But he connected more deeply with his Japanese heritage, so he was learning a language that, had things been different, he may have grown up speaking.

He had taken kendo since he was a child, though the dojo he learned from used the term interchangeably with "fencing" and taught both Eastern and Western styles. He had a few antique katana and other Japanese memorabilia from his grandmother's family. There was something deeply comfortable about wearing the kimono that had once belonged to his great-grandfather, and not just because they were the same height and build.

Friends who had never seen his room believed him thoroughly American. This was true enough, but relearning his heritage culture made him feel closer to the ancestors he had never met.

It didn't hurt that his father once stated his regret that he hadn't learned Japanese when he was young and it would have come more easily. Hikaru was constantly looking for the option his father would have chosen, so that even if he didn't select the same, he could smile and think, "I _know_ my father would have done this." It was another way to feel close to his ancestors; albeit one he had met and looked up to very much.

He supposed he also was trying to ensure that he would never be, as the Japanese idiom put it, "a horse with no skeleton." He had family, though he kept most of them alive in his heart for lack of a better option.


	8. Not Worth Having

A/N: I am skipping Hikaru's chapter until I can find the Japanese idiom I want, after which it will be put up in its proper place.

-

"Grandma, I'll be fine," Nyota said insistently. "It's one little date. He's a nice guy."

"I worry about you, baby. You don't know how beautiful you are." Ramla touched Nyota's cheek and fixed some of the smudged makeup. "Be careful. And if he gets intimidated by your intelligence, then he's not a man worth having, you understand?"

Nyota smiled. "Grandma, I don't date stupid boys. Why should he feel intimidated?"

But it was clear, only twenty minutes into their discussion of their xenobiology class, that Baingana _was_ intimidated. And for a man with a name that meant "people are equal," he also came off as a bigot. She left before dessert, frustrated and angry. For a moment she had guiltily wondered if she was trying to show off, before shaking herself of the sentiment. She had acted the way she always did. And if he couldn't accept that…

She straightened her shoulders. Grandmother was right. He's not a man worth having.


	9. FML

To get a proper Federation Medical License, which any doctor planning to do more than a tiny, rural family practice needed, medical students went a full extra year of school, taking crash courses in all the Federation races, learning wildly different anatomical structures and systems. For some reason, Vulcanoids gave Leonard McCoy the most trouble.

Vulcans and Romulans (collectively, Vulcanoids) were very problematic patients, for different reasons. All blood tests had to be done completely different for copper-based blood. Major organs were in different – some would say "illogical" – places. Romulans were wildly emotional and didn't like any diagnosis. If they were healthy, they complained that they still felt ill. If they were ill, they complained they were going to die, and wasn't he a doctor, shouldn't he _do_ something about it?

Vulcans accepted every diagnosis with a calm that made him uneasy, made him doubt himself. They said things like "It is logical to trust a specialist like yourself," which only felt pointed and sarcastic. They masked pain and emotions he needed to see to know when he was doing the right thing. One young Vulcan woman had nearly let him re-break the wrong broken finger. It was enough to drive a man to drink!

Still, Leonard McCoy got his FML and hung the damn thing on the wall of his office. Take that, you green-blooded hobgoblins.

-

The "FML" abbreviation was an accidental irony. So here's my take on the initial seed of McCoy's disdain for Vulcans.


	10. Chop Shop at the End of the Universe

Best and brightest in all his engineering classes and where does he end up? A little chop-shop at the end of the universe. Monty sighed. That wasn't entirely true. Llantwit Major wasn't much of a town, but Wales didn't strictly qualify as the end of the universe. At any rate, he had steady (if dubiously legal) business and was living in relative comfort. The problem was with the work itself.

Oh, he loved cars. And he _loved_ engines, even the relatively simple ones in modern terrain vehicles. But Monty had big dreams, big aspirations, and he was aching to get his hands on a warp coil or four. There was no challenge in the little roadsters. Even the souped-up beauties he put together for street racers no longer held his interest.

There were a few ways for a delinquent like him to get into the engineering room of a space-ship, but most of them were dead boring ways. Sign up with a merchant ship? No thank you. They ran skeleton crews, too, so he probably wouldn't even have anyone to drink with. Stowaway? He shivered. He'd tried that once. The captain had tanned his arse. He didn't think the plan improved upon age. He'd probably get shot instead of returned, bawling, to his mum.

Which left him with his only real choice, which would be a bit chancy, considering his past. Still, Starfleet was always recruiting, eh?


	11. No One Worth Sharing With

A/N: sorry for the long delay. I've been writing and reading a lot of fic over at the Star Trek Kink Meme on livejournal. And then…school happened. Again.

-

He was far too young to be here, but he didn't really care. He knew what the instructors were talking about and he was perfectly capable of handling the workload. Even the hand-to-hand combat classes weren't too difficult; they taught him arts that capitalized on his smaller frame and his speed. He loved running track and made top scores in all his classes and in general, the recruiter who had told him "you could do great things, and Starfleet Academy can help you achieve them" was proven correct.

Other cadets were not always very understanding, though. He had been accepted on scholarship two or three years before they were even considered. It was no good to say his parents had always accelerated his studies. It was pointless to remind them that he produced his first published work, exploring a new theorem in mathematics he'd discovered, had been received with pleasure by the scientific community, an act he felt confirmed his belonging here.

They were cruel, at times, defacing his door, breaking into his room and stealing or destroying his things. After the first week, he kept everything he cared about or didn't want to recreate in a locked steamer trunk made of dense wood covered in thick leather and braced with steel. The hinges were, of course, interior, and the lock was solid. The top drawer often carried his homework. A false bottom hid a few bottles of vodka his mother had sent with him.

His parents loved him, Pavel thought cheerfully when he looked at the vodka. He didn't drink it, not because he couldn't handle his liquor, but because opening a bottle and not finishing it was terrible luck, and while he could down a whole one in a single sitting, it took most of the night and left him with a slightly upset stomach the next morning. He would rather share.

And so far, he had met no one in this place worth sharing with.


	12. Best Friend

His roommate was a second-year cadet. That was fairly normal. Starfleet tried to pair new cadets with more senior ones, to give them someone who could show them the ropes.

His roommate was four years younger than him. That was…more than a little weird.

Cadet Chekov was clearly a genius, he knew within moments. He was a nice genius, but that changed nothing. He treated calculus like breathing. He already knew more about the stars than the navigator classes covered in four years.

Hikaru was a little off-balance around the kid. There was this big-brother instinct that made him want to protect his younger roommate. There was the military instinct to respect his senior. There was academic admiration.

For the most part, Hikaru settled on being nice, approachable, and helpful. It paid off.

"Cadet Sulu," Chekov grinned, holding up a bottle. "Would you like to share a gift from my homeland with me?"

"Is that – vodka?" Hikaru blinked. "I mean, isn't that contraband?"

Chekov's grin widened. "Technically, yes. But this rule is hardly enforced – if it was, half the Academy would be on probation most of the time."

Hikaru thought about it for less than half a second. "Just the two of us for the whole bottle?"

"Yes, but it is not so bad as you Americans always think. I will teach you how to drink properly."

Somewhat bemused, Sulu sat at the table when Chekov directed him to. Glasses – really nice glasses – were set out, as well as steaming piles of totally unidentifiable food. Chekov happily named the dishes in Russian, and explained that vodka was never meant to be drunk without food, and the mere idea of doing so was sacrilege.

The food ("not as good as my Mama's, of course") was…not something Hikaru would have picked for a meal. There was little spice to it, and it was mostly starches. Still, it complemented the vodka quite well, and as he got drunker, the taste improved…or he stopped caring.

They were a quarter into the bottle when he put the pieces together. Chekov was homesick. Somewhere at the halfway mark of the bottle, he realized he was Chekov's only friend. There was a finger or two left when Hikaru figured out Chekov may not have been his only friend, but he was certainly the best one.


	13. Not Unreturned

A/N: Sorry this took so long! I've had a rough patch of school and not felt very Star Trek inspired lately. The last couple of chapters will be up shortly. I can't believe it's actually done!! Thanks everyone who read along!

* * *

Linguistics was her specialty. More than her specialty, it was one of few subjects that had truly held her interest for more than a year. Nyota settled into life as "Cadet Uhura" gracefully, with the exception of regular encounters with the obnoxious Jim Kirk.

She got along surprisingly well with her roommate, when Gaila wasn't bringing guys back to the room. They both got homesick sometimes, commiserated often, and helped each other study.

School wasn't the hard part. Her monstrous crush on Commander-Professor Spock was the hard part. She hadn't been tongue-tied around a boy in almost a decade, but with Commander Spock around, she forgot basic elements of linguistics and speech. Open consonants turned to plosives, sibilants to stutters, and she actually whistled instead of breathing one of the more complex Vulcan vowels. She was mortified. Spock was confused at first, and then his mouth twitched just slightly, eyes betraying a hint of amusement.

She was effectively laughed at. A Vulcan actually _laughed_ at her. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

But life went on, unfortunately. She found her place in the class – the very top – something of a surprise, to the point that she went to Spock during his office hours to ask why she'd received those marks.

"Because, Cadet Uhura, you earned them. You scored full marks on every test. You attempted to participate despite apparently debilitating performance anxiety…I recommend counseling for that. Becoming an officer is difficult if you can't speak in front of people, and quite frankly…I haven't seen any linguist I'd recommend more strongly for promotion, based on sheer knowledge and intuitive understanding. Once you have confidence in your abilities…"

"Commander – I don't have stage fright. I have never had a problem participating in class before. It's…a new problem," she said slowly, not wanting to blame Spock outright. "It's…"

He listened patiently.

"I – " she switched to Swahili and ranted for a moment at how infuriating the inability to speak made her.

Spock extended a hand, and then aborted the gesture.

"I'm experiencing feelings for you that unbalance my emotional state and impact my articulation in large groups," Uhura said, closing her eyes. It was surprisingly much easier if she didn't have to look at Spock.

"Cadet…Nyota." This time the tips of his fingers brushed her cheek. She opened her eyes. "Your feelings are not unreturned."


	14. Half of Nothing

Susannah made him want to strangle someone on good days, now. McCoy tried not to sob into his whiskey, leery of becoming a total cliché.

First she said they didn't see each other enough. Okay. He took time off work, took his wife to that new restaurant, helped her fix up the kitchen, helped her mind the lawn and they even played with baby Joanna for a while. Then she said he was neglecting his work, so he went back, trying to keep evenings clear and be home for dinner as often as possible.

Then she said he was spending too much, so he stopped smoking and cut back the whiskey to hardly a bottle a month, just a finger every other evening or so. Then she said he was surly without his alcohol and worse with it, so he stared at her perplexed and said, "Woman, I was surly when you married me."

But what really got his dander up was her most recent stunt. He'd come home early with a bouquet of flowers, intending to surprise his wife on her birthday, only to find her on their marriage bed with that – that – that _green-blooded, pointy-eared BASTARD_.

He didn't know the kid, some tourist or maybe a cadet in town on leave. He wasn't even sure if the hobgoblin was Romulan or Vulcan.

But that _woman _had the nerve not just to cheat on him (which he could not prove, of course, being more concerned with getting that punk _out _of his house and cleaning the bed he had shared with his wife for seven years) but to record his reaction and use it as fodder for their divorce! He was sure he sounded like a screaming, crazy xenophobe, babbling nonsensically about Vulcan bastards in his house, near his child, and lying she-beasts like her who cuckold and pervert the institution of marriage. Hell, he probably sounded abusive, too.

She just made him so _furious_. And now she had taken him for all he was worth, forcing the sale of both houses and taking all the profits from the one they'd bought when he was in medical school. He admitted her credit had been used, since he was a poor student, but who had been paying the property taxes, and who paid off most of the mortgage? It was the sale of his childhood home that really burned, though. That sprawling Georgia estate had been in the family for six generations. He'd inherited it from his parents hardly three months before the divorce got started, hadn't even had time to go through his late mother's things.

Did Susannah react with compassion, _allow_ him to keep the only place left where everything made sense? The orchards where he'd proposed to her? No. She'd even auctioned most of his mother's things to the highest bidder, the things that hadn't specifically been willed to him, instead of them as a couple.

Someone in the bar turned the jukebox to a mournful country tune from the 20th century. McCoy toyed with the tumbler of whiskey.

Seven years of heart and soul he had poured into this marriage. _She_ was the one who cheated. _He _was the one being taken for a ride. But did the judge listen? She got custody, the jury looking at him like a freak and calling him a xenophobe behind closed doors, he was sure. She got his baby girl, the light of his life who he now might never see again. He got half of the money from his parents' house – and she hadn't even tried to charge its worth – and the few heirlooms she hadn't been able to say were for Joanna or should be sold. Three quilts. One in pinks and purples, not quite finished but he'd been suturing since he was sixteen, he could sew a few patches of fabric. That one had always been meant for his daughter, and she would get it by her tenth birthday if it killed him. Another of blues and reds, that the _hobgoblin_ had taken his wife on; he could hardly look at it and was pretty sure it would never be clean. And the third, greens and blues and browns, was the double-bed size that had lain on his boyhood bed. It was soft and worn from years of being tucked under his chin.

Then there were two pens. His father's favorite fountain pen; it had signed thousands of prescriptions. It was comfortable and easy to work, and Leonard had always loved playing with the shiny silver pen when he was younger. The other was older than dirt, carved from ivory in a time before that got a man arrested. It had never been used, as far as he knew, except to sign for ownership of the orchard and farmhouse he no longer had rights to. Its design showed ships sailing and a bit of the night sky from who knew how many hundreds of years ago. That pen came with an ivory pipe, which had been used and worn to bits, and Leonard had been unable to find it in all his frantic searching of the boxes.

Last was the pocket watch. It, too, had been in the family longer than the house. Each son of the McCoy family had had his initials engraved on the inside, and Leonard touched his father's reverently. The mechanism needed almost constant work and he had about three other gadgets he actually used for keeping time, but this wasn't about functionality. It was history, and he had loved the ticking noise, being able to wind back time, whenever his father had gotten it tuned recently.

His mother had paid to get LHM engraved below. There wasn't much space left on the plating, after ten sets of initials. McCoy was glad of that. He'd need the money from the sale of the house to pay his damn lawyer fees. He didn't know when he'd be able to pay for something like this, even if it was family tradition.

What would he do now? The whole town thought he was some kind of abusive bigot, and McCoy was too tired – and too drunk – to correct them. His little practice had been sold for all it was worth, or maybe less. He barely cared; it wasn't like he would see any of the money for that, either. Atlanta General might take him for a while, but half his salary went to Susannah in child support anyway. Half an entry level doctor's salary would go a long way in raising a child, but it wouldn't be enough to support a grown man trying to find an apartment in pricey Atlanta.

McCoy smirked evilly. Let's see how Susannah liked half of nothing. McCoy knew of a kind of doctor he could be that required a few more years of training, of school. Free, with room and board, but a pittance of an allowance for those years, and after that, who knew? Starfleet was always looking for trained medical officers.


	15. Oops?

He was a genius. He didn't need the instructors to tell him that, his so-called peers did it often enough. They were good to go pub-crawling with, but he had a feeling several would not have passed transporter theory without his help.

And now one of his "instructors" doubted his math, his _ability_. Well, Montgomery Scott wouldn't stand for that! This was a matter of pride, reputations were on the line. Mainly his, but that wasn't the important bit.

_Of course_ you could send a grapefruit to an adjacent planet. That was ridiculously simple. What's more, Scotty was talented enough to send a life-form! Okay, he'd never done it before, but the equations were flawless and there was a logical progression here. People didn't like to push limits too quickly at once, but he knew how far he could go.

It was surprisingly easy to steal Admiral Archer's dog. The beagle loved people, and he particularly loved a bit of brandy, which Scotty had given him a nip at to make him more compliant. The dog obediently trotted up to the transporter pad, Scotty punched in the equations, and the dog was beamed away.

Only later did he realize the dog hadn't gone where it was supposed to. Oops?


End file.
